You’re playing poker. It’s quite late in the evening, the room is full of smoke, and your 19 fellow players are starting to fade. It’s about time: almost all of the money is in their piles, not yours.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Although everyone started out the night with different amounts of cash, it’s a gentleman’s game – or, at least, that’s what you thought earlier in the evening – and anything could happen. Then, it does.

On a trip to the restroom, you find a chip on the floor and realize it has fallen from a shelf in the hall. A box on that shelf is stuffed with more chips, just sitting there: hundreds of chips in 10, 100, even 1,000-dollar denominations. You close the box, leave the first chip on the floor, and go back to the table.

Over the next few hours, you notice your friends taking restroom trips more and more often. Even though they’ve had losing hands, their funds have been increasing; they have to be taking chips from the hall. Everyone, it seems, is doing it. OK, you took a few, too, but then it just seemed too – well, too sleazy. So you stopped.

Now the night’s over, and for whatever reasons, their piles are larger than ever – much larger than yours.